The output formats in the previous sections handle a wide variety of usage, but of course there is always room for more.
If you are a programmer and would like to contribute to the GNU
project by implementing additional output formats for Texinfo, that
would be excellent. The way to do this that would be most useful is
to write a new back-end for texi2any, our reference
implementation of a Texinfo parser; it creates a tree representation
of the Texinfo input that you can use for the conversion. The
documentation in the source file
tp/Texinfo/Convert/Converter.pm is a good place to start
(see Texinfo::Convert::Converter in Texinfo modules documentation).
See texi2any: The Translator for Texinfo.
Another viable approach is use the Texinfo XML output from
texi2any as your input. This XML is an essentially complete
representation of the input, but without the Texinfo syntax and option
peculiarities, as described above.
If you still cannot resist the temptation of writing a new program
that reads Texinfo source directly, let us give some more caveats:
please do not underestimate the amount of work required. Texinfo is
by no means a simple language to parse correctly, and remains under
development, so you would be committing to an ongoing task. You
are advised to check that the tests of the language that come with
texi2any give correct results with your new program.
From time to time, proposals are made to generate traditional Unix man pages from Texinfo source. However, because man pages have a strict conventional format, creating a good man page requires a completely different source from that needed for the typical Texinfo applications of writing a good user tutorial and/or a good reference manual. This makes generating man pages incompatible with the Texinfo design goal of not having to document the same information in different ways for different output formats. You might as well write the man page directly.
As an alternative way to support man pages, you may find the program
help2man to be useful. It generates a traditional man page
from the ‘--help’ output of a program. In fact, the man pages
for the programs in the Texinfo distribution are generated with this.
It is GNU software written by Brendan O’Dea, available from
http://www.gnu.org/software/help2man.